Julian Grosskreutz (University of Jena, Germany)

Voxel-based morphometry has been designed to detect changes in volume of the grey matter. In white matter, it should be used with caution and regularly failed to detect disease related pathology in ALS/MND. Our aim was to develop an alternate analysis route to identify disease related intensity changes in T1 images in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Using interim data from the Christian Gaser VBM toolbox preprocessing we were able to delineate vast white matter pathology in a group of 30 ALS patients versus controls. These changes were prominent along the corticospinal tract and extended into tracts connected to the primary sensorimotor cortex and frontal areas. The new approach of T1 voxel-based intensitometry greatly increases the sensitivity of T1 datasets to detect ALS related pathology. Greater numbers of patients, longitudinal datasets and multicenter studies (ie. in the framework of the NISALS initiative) need to be analyzed to determine the use of VBI in diagnosing and monitoring ALS/MND.